Meredith Corporation restructures ad sales after latest acquisition

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Meredith Corp. is restructuring the ad sales operations at recently acquired Time Inc. to focus on individual magazine brands rather than broader advertising categories, such as automotive, technology, or pharmaceuticals, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Since the acquisition in January, Meredith has made several major adjustments to operations at Time Inc., including significant layoffs and, last week, moving to sell legacy news-oriented, male-skewing brands TIME, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, per Reuters.

Meredith's latest move to reorganize Time Inc.'s ad sales operations under Meredith's existing sales structure aims to drive stronger relationships between specific magazine brands and advertisers, which has been key to Meredith's strategy. Conversely, since implementing changes to its own structure in 2016, Time Inc.'s sales teams have engaged in "category selling," i.e. selling on larger ad categories across its portfolio.

Time Inc. execs pursued the strategy in a bid to better leverage the company's scale across its portfolio of brands, as it competed for digital ad market share with the likes of digital giants Google and Facebook. However, Time Inc.'s approach never manifested the demand it anticipated from the change. Meredith management now appears to believe that its own ad sales strategy has advantages over the one that has been governing Time Inc. brands.

The changes to the structure will include two key moves:

Meredith's ad sales operations — including newly acquired Time Inc. brands — will now take a "hybrid" (best-of-both-worlds) approach that combines both strategies, and liberates both sales teams and advertisers. Specifically, ad sales teams will be able to focus on broader categories that can encompass multiple brands, or they can elect to pitch specific magazine brands to larger accounts. For example, if an advertiser wants to target one specific audience, it can work directly with that publisher brand. Likewise, if an advertiser wants to extend its reach to a target audience that could encompass multiple brands, it can work with a broader ad category. The new sales strategy will also reportedly apply to the Time Inc. titles that Meredith has expressed interest in selling.

In addition to changing the way Time Inc. sells across its brands, Meredith's restructuring effort will also incorporate The Foundry, a Brooklyn-based creative shop, into Meredith's digital business unit. The Foundry will become the central creative lab and branded/native content studio for Meredith. The integration will see Foundry staffers relocate from Brooklyn into Meredith's downtown Manhattan offices, where their creative work will flow into Meredith's broader digital advertising efforts and drive further ad product innovation.

As print advertising continues to drop across the publishing industry, legacy publishers have had to move swiftly to implement digital strategies they hope will sufficiently offset increasingly significant print ad losses while they compete for digital ad dollars.